Tag: brussels
Belgium Identifies Brussels Bomb Suspect, Suicide Bombers: Media

Belgium Identifies Brussels Bomb Suspect, Suicide Bombers: Media

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Belgian police have identified a prime suspect in Tuesday’s Brussels blasts and two suspected suicide bombers, linking them directly to Islamic State militants behind last November’s Paris attacks, Belgian media reported on Wednesday.

Najim Laachraoui, 25, is believed to be the man seen on CCTV pushing a baggage trolley alongside the bombers and then running out of the Brussels airport terminal.

Earlier some media reported that he had been captured in the Brussels borough of Anderlecht, but they later said the person detained was not Laachraoui.

Police and prosecutors refused immediate comment but the federal prosecutor was due to hold a news conference at 1200 GMT.

The death toll in the attacks on the Belgian capital, home to the European Union and NATO, rose to at least 31 with some 260 wounded, Health Minister Maggie De Block said on VRT television. It could rise further because some of the bomb victims at Maelbeek metro station were blown to pieces and victims are hard to identify.

One of the suspects seen on CCTV pushing baggage trolleys at Brussels airport just before the explosions was identified as Brahim El Bakraoui, public broadcaster RTBF reported. It said his brother, Khalid, blew himself up on the metro train.

Both had criminal records for armed robbery but had not previously been linked by investigators to Islamist militants.

Laachraoui is wanted in connection with the Paris attacks. His DNA was found on at least two explosives belts used in those attacks and at a Brussels hideout used last week by prime Paris suspect Salah Abdeslam, who was arrested last Friday after a shoot-out with police.

RTBF said Khalid El Bakraoui had rented under a false name the apartment in the city’s Forest borough, where police hunting Abdeslam killed a gunman in a raid last week. He is also believed to have rented a safe house in the southern Belgian city of Charleroi used to mount last November’s Paris attacks.

The Syrian-based Islamist group claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attacks, four days after Abdeslam’s arrest in Brussels, warning of “black days” for those fighting it in Syria and Iraq. Belgian warplanes have joined the coalition in the Middle East, but Brussels has long been a center of Islamist militancy.

 

Security Review

The attacks sent shockwaves across Europe and around the world, with authorities racing to review security at airports and on public transport, and rekindled debate about European security cooperation and police methods.

Prime Minister Charles Michel canceled a trip to China and convened his inner cabinet to discuss security. Belgium observed a nationwide minute’s silence at noon (1100 GMT). King Philippe, the premier and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker attended a memorial event at Commission headquarters.

More than 1,000 people gathered around an improvised shrine with candles and street paintings outside the Brussels bourse.

The Brussels blasts fueled political debate across the globe about how to combat militants.

“We can and we will defeat those who threaten the safety and security of people all around the world,” said U.S. President Barack Obama.

Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination to succeed Obama in November’s U.S. election, suggested suspects could be tortured to avert such attacks.

Police searched an apartment in the northern Brussels borough of Schaerbeek late into the night, finding another bomb, an Islamic State flag and bomb-making chemicals.

Local media said authorities had followed a tip from a taxi driver who may have driven the bombers to the airport.

An unused explosive device was later found at the airport and a man wearing a light-colored jacket and a hat, believed to be Laachraoui, was seen running away from the terminal after the explosions.

 

Closing In

Security experts believed the blasts, which killed about 20 people on a metro train running through the area that houses EU institutions, were probably in preparation before Friday’s arrest of locally based French national Abdeslam, 26, whom prosecutors accuse of a key role in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks.

He was caught and has been speaking to investigators after a shootout at an apartment in the south of the city a week ago, after which another Islamic State flag and explosives were found. It was unclear whether he had knowledge of the new attacker whether accomplices may have feared police were closing in.

Islamic State said in a statement that “caliphate soldiers, strapped with suicide vests and carrying explosive devices and machine guns” struck Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station.

It was not clear, however, that the attackers used vests. The suspects were photographed pushing bags on trolleys, and witnesses said many of the airport dead and wounded were hit mostly in the legs, possibly indicating blasts at floor level.

The two men in dark clothes wore gloves on their left hands only. One security expert speculated they might have concealed detonators. The man in the hat was not wearing gloves.

About 300 Belgians are estimated to have fought with Islamists in Syria, making the country of 11 million the leading European exporter of foreign fighters and a focus of concern in France and other neighbors over its security capabilities.

Reviving arguments over Belgian policies following the Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed in an operation apparently organized from Brussels, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin spoke of “naiveté” on the part of “certain leaders” in holding back from security crackdowns on Muslim communities.

Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders retorted that each country should look to its own social problems, saying France too had rough high-rise suburbs in which militants had become radicalized.

Life began to return to normal in Brussels on Wednesday, with some public transport working and cars returning to the European district, but the metro system remained closed and the airport was still shut to travelers.

 

(Editing by Paul Taylor and Janet Lawrence)

Photo: A soldier stands near broken windows after explosions at Zaventem airport near Brussels, Belgium, March 22, 2016. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

 

Attacks On Brussels Airport, Metro Kill 34: Public Broadcaster

Attacks On Brussels Airport, Metro Kill 34: Public Broadcaster

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Thirty-four people were killed in attacks on Brussels airport and a rush-hour metro train in the Belgian capital on Tuesday, according to public broadcaster VRT, triggering security alerts across Europe and bringing some cross-border traffic to a halt.

A witness said he heard shouts in Arabic and shots shortly before two blasts struck a packed airport departure lounge at Brussels airport. The federal prosecutor said one of the explosions was probably triggered by a suicide bomber.

The blasts occurred four days after the arrest in Brussels of a suspected participant in November militant attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. Belgian police and combat troops on the streets had been on alert for reprisal but the attacks took place in crowded areas where people and bags are not searched.

All public transport in Brussels was shut down, as it was in London during 2005 Islamist militant attacks there that killed 52. Authorities appealed to citizens not to use overloaded telephone networks, extra troops were sent into the city and the Belgian Crisis Centre, clearly wary of a further incident, appealed to the population: “Stay where you are”.

British Sky News television’s Alex Rossi, at the airport, said he heard two “very, very loud explosions”.

“I could feel the building move. There was also dust and smoke as well…I went towards where the explosion came from and there were people coming out looking very dazed and shocked.”

VRT said police had found a Kalashnikov assault rifle next to the body of an attacker at the airport. Such weapons have become a trademark of Islamic State-inspired attacks in Europe, notably in Belgium and France, including on Nov. 13 in Paris.

An unused explosive belt was also found in the area, the public broadcaster said. Police were continuing to scour the airport for any further bombs or attackers.

Alphonse Youla, 40, who works at the airport, told Reuters he heard a man shouting out in Arabic before the first explosion. “Then the glass ceiling of the airport collapsed.”

“I helped carry out five people dead, their legs destroyed,” he said, his hands covered in blood.

A witness said the blasts occurred at a check-in desk.

Video showed devastation in the hall with ceiling tiles and glass scattered across the floor. Some passengers emerged from the terminal with blood spattered over their clothes. Smoke rose from the building through shattered windows and passengers fled down a slipway, some still hauling their bags.

Public broadcaster RTBF said police were searching houses in the Brussels area.

VRT said 20 were killed in the metro train and 14 at the airport. Authorities had earlier put the toll at 11 in the airport bombing and 15 in the underground train.

Many of the dead and wounded at the airport were badly injured in the legs, one airport worker told Reuters, suggesting at least one bomb in a bag on the floor.

Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands, all wary of spillover from conflict in Syria, were among states announcing extra security measures.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel spoke of “a black time for our country”.

“What we feared has come to pass. Our country has been struck by attacks which are blind, violent and cowardly.”

The blast hit the train as it left Maelbeek station, close to European Union institutions, heading to the city center.

The VRT public broadcaster carried a photograph of a metro carriage at a platform with doors and windows completely blown out, its structure deformed and interior mangled and charred.

A local journalist tweeted a photograph of a person lying covered in blood among smoke outside Maelbeek metro station, on the main Rue de la Loi avenue which connects central Brussels with the EU institutions. Ambulances were ferrying the wounded away and sirens rang out across the area.

 

“We Are At War”

“We are at war and we have been subjected to acts of war in Europe for the last few months,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said.

Public broadcaster VTM said the Tihange nuclear power plant had been evacuated as part of the security clampdown.

Brussels airport said it had canceled all flights until at least 6 a.m. (0500 GMT) on Wednesday and the complex had been evacuated and trains to the airport had been stopped. Passengers were taken to coaches from the terminal that would remove them to a secure area.

All three main long-distance rail stations in Brussels were closed and train services on the cross-channel tunnel from London to Brussels were suspended.

Security services have been on a high state of alert across western Europe for fear of militant attacks backed by Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the Paris attack.

While most European airports are known for stringent screening procedures of passengers and their baggage, that typically takes place only once passengers have checked in and are heading to the departure gates.

Although there may be discreet surveillance, there is nothing to prevent member of the public walking in to the departure hall at Zaventem airport with heavy baggage.

Following an attempted ramraid attack at Glasgow Airport in 2007, several airports stepped up security at entrances by altering the pick-up and drop-off zones to prevent private cars getting too close to terminal buildings.

European stocks fell after the explosions, particularly travel sector stocks including airlines and hotels, pulling the broader indices down from multi-week highs. Safe-haven assets, gold and government bonds rose in price.

The attacks appeared to be linked to the arrest of French citizen Salah Abdeslam – the prime surviving suspect for November’s Paris attacks on a stadium, cafes and a concert hall – who was captured by Belgian police after a shootout on Friday.

Belgium’s Interior Minister, Jan Jambon, said on Monday the country was on high alert for a revenge attack.

It was not clear what failings if any allowed the plan for Tuesday’s operation to go ahead and whether the double attack was planned in advance or put together at short notice.

“We know that stopping one cell can … push others into action. We are aware of it in this case,” Jambon said.

 

(Reporting by Barbara Lewis; Additional reporting by Andrew Heavens; Editing by Ralph Boulton)

Photo: Injured people are seen at the scene of explosions at Zaventem airport near Brussels, Belgium, March 22, 2016, in this handout courtesy of David Crunelle via Twitter. REUTERS/David Crunelle via Twitter  @davidcrunelle/Handout via Reuters

‘I Was A Suicide Bomber’: Paris Suspect Charged In Belgium

‘I Was A Suicide Bomber’: Paris Suspect Charged In Belgium

By Alastair Macdonald and John Irish

BRUSSELS/PARIS (Reuters) – The prime surviving suspect for the Nov. 13 Paris attacks planned to blow himself up at a sports stadium with fellow Islamic State militants but changed his mind, he told Belgian investigators on Saturday.

The admission by Salah Abdeslam came a day after he was shot in the leg and captured during a police raid in Brussels, ending an intensive four-month manhunt.

“He wanted to blow himself up at the Stade de France and … backed out,” said the lead French investigator, Francois Molins, quoting Abdeslam’s statement to a magistrate in Brussels before he was transferred to a secure jail in Bruges.

The gun and bomb attacks on the stadium, bars and a concert hall killed 130 people and marked the deadliest militant assault in Europe since 2004.

Molins told reporters in Paris that people should treat with caution initial statements by the 26-year-old French national. But his capture and apparent urge to talk marked a major breakthrough for investigators after the trail had seemed to go cold.

Abdeslam’s lawyer said he admitted being in Paris during the attacks but gave no details. He told reporters his client, born and raised by Moroccan immigrants in Brussels, had cooperated with investigators but would fight extradition to France.

Legal experts said his challenge was unlikely to succeed but would buy him weeks, possibly months, to prepare his defense.

Belgian prosecutors charged Abdeslam and a man arrested with him with “participation in terrorist murder”.

Abdeslam’s elder brother Brahim, with whom he used to run a bar, was among the suicide bombers. Salah’s confession suggested he was the 10th man mentioned in an Islamic State claim of responsibility for the attacks, after which police found one suicide vest abandoned in garbage.

Abdeslam’s family, who had urged him to give himself up, said through their lawyer that they had a “sense of relief”.

Authorities hope the arrest may help disrupt other militant cells that Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said were certainly “out there” and planning further violence. French security services stepped up their measures at frontier crossings after a global warning from Interpol that other fugitives might try to move country.

“We’ve won a battle against the forces of ignorance but the struggle isn’t over,” Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said.

The case has raised tensions with France but Michel and French President Francois Hollande, who was in Brussels for an EU summit when Abdeslam was arrested, praised each other’s security services. Hollande was attending an international soccer match at the Stade de France when the bombers struck.

 

Fight Risk

A man using false papers in the names of Amine Choukri and Monir Ahmed Alaaj was also charged with terrorist murder. As Choukri, he was documented by German police in the city of Ulm in October when he was stopped in a car with Abdeslam. French prosecutor Molins said Abdeslam traveled widely to prepare the attacks.

A third man in the house when the pair were arrested was charged with belonging to a terrorist organization. He and a woman who was present were charged with concealing criminals.

Police had sought Abdeslam since he called two acquaintances in Belgium in a panic, hours after the attacks, to have them collect him and bring him home. Suspected to be as far away as Syria, it seems he was in Brussels all or most of the time.

Failure to complete his mission could have limited his access to any support from Syria-based Islamic State; the chief Belgian investigator on the case said he had instead relied on a network of friends, family and neighbors with whom he had a history of drug trafficking and petty crime.

Security agencies’ difficulties in penetrating some Muslim communities, particularly in pursuit of Belgium’s unusually high number of citizens fighting in Syria, have been a key factor in the inquiry.

 

PARIS RELIEF

As Parisians, and families of the victims, voiced relief at the arrest, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after an emergency cabinet meeting that a trial could answer questions for those who suffered in the attacks.

“Abdeslam will have to answer to French justice for his acts,” he said. “It is an important blow to the terrorist organization Daesh (Islamic State) in Europe.”

A trickle of people came to a makeshift memorial in central Paris, near the scene of much of the bloodshed, to pay their respects.

“It’s really a relief,” said Emilien Bouthillier, who works in the neighborhood. “I can’t wait for Belgium to transfer and return him to France so he can be tried the way he should be.”

Friday’s armed swoop came after Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found at an apartment following a bloody raid on Tuesday in which an Algerian was shot dead and police officers wounded.

Later, local media said, a tip-off and a tapped telephone led police to a mobile phone number used by Abdeslam and, by triangulating the device’s location, established where he was.

At his nearby newspaper store, a vendor named Dominique said Abdeslam had been well known and liked in the community: “He was a very nice lad before,” he said. “How can things go this far?”

 

(Additional reporting by Robin Emmott, Clement Rossignol, Hortense de Roffignac, Philip Blenkinsop and Jan Strupczewski in Brussels and Miranda Alexander-Webber in Bruges; writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Photo: Belgian police officers secure the departure of Salah Abdeslam, the most-wanted fugitive from November’s Paris attacks, from the federal police headquarters in Brussels, March 19, 2016, after he was arrested after a shootout with police in Brussels on Friday.    REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

‘Rambo’ Appeal, Not The Mosque, Lures Brussels Youths To IS

‘Rambo’ Appeal, Not The Mosque, Lures Brussels Youths To IS

By Alissa de Carbonnel

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Khalid Ben Larbi lived a hedonistic lifestyle similar to other European youths and rarely went to the mosque in Molenbeek, the mainly Muslim Moroccan immigrant area where he and three of the suspected Paris attackers grew up in Brussels.

It was the same inner-city disenchantment that leads other youths to drugs and crime, not the preachings of a radical imam, that neighbors, local social workers and imams say changed Ben Larbi from raucous adolescent to Islamic State foot soldier, drawn by the promise of adventure and glory.

The families in Molenbeek and other areas are often shocked to discover their children have been recruited by a mix of back street preachers, social media and a growing network of hometown jihadists spreading tales of derring-do in Syria.

Ben Larbi was a “regular guy”, liked the movies, was comfortably off. Then one day last year, he disappeared to fight in Syria before returning to Belgium in January when the 23-year-old was killed in a police raid, Kalashnikov in hand.

“His mother was totally shocked. Even now, months later, she doesn’t go out,” a local woman who knows the family told Reuters as police searched Brussels for Salah Abdeslam, a key suspect in the Nov. 13 IS attacks in Paris. “He said he was going to see friends. Next thing they knew, he was calling from Syria.”

Ben Larbi’s family could not be contacted for comment.

He joined up in Syria with another Molenbeek man, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected planner of the Paris attacks who was killed by French police last week.

They posted Internet videos, some gory, some jokey. Abaaoud, 28, who shocked his own family by heading to Syria in 2013 according to interviews with his family in Belgian media, dubbed himself the “tourist terrorist”. Officials believe he has lured other Molenbeek men into violence.

“The Syrian problem has broken us,” said Jamal Habbachich, who heads a council of 22 Molenbeek mosques. “Families come to us devastated.”

Having paid little attention to Muslim practices in the past, families often only realize their sons have changed when they take their relatives to task for lax observance, says Olivier Vanderhaegen, who works for a new service set up by Molenbeek borough this year to combat youth radicalization.

“That is clearly a final phase of radicalization; and it’s usually only then that families realize there is a problem; and often almost too late,” he said at his office near Abdeslam’s home.

IDENTITY CRISIS

With Brussels locked down for three days for fear Salah Abdeslam or others could mount new, Paris-style attacks, their story has put the spotlight on Molenbeek.

On the wrong side of the city’s canal, the borough is afflicted by overcrowding and high youth unemployment, the same problems that are blamed for delinquency and ghettoization in other inner city communities.

That is combined with a feeling among some of Moroccan descent that they belong neither in Morocco or Belgium.

“The radicalization we see is essentially an identity crisis,” said Vanderhaegen.

Abdeslam, 26, who ran a local bar in trouble with the drug squad, knew Abaaoud in prison, security officials say. Both men did time for petty larceny four or five years ago. Noone thought he cared about religion.

But, his elder brother Mohamed told Belgian television on Sunday, he began to notice earlier this year that Salah and another brother, Brahim, started to pray and stopped drinking alcohol at social gatherings.

Brahim, who owned the bar Salah ran, blew himself up outside the Comptoir Voltaire cafe in Paris.

The brothers, like most of their neighbors, are the children and grandchildren of Moroccan migrants invited en masse by Belgium in the 1960s to plug labor shortages.

“My grandfather worked for 25 years in the coal mines, my father died there, and people still look at me sideways,” said Fatima, 42, outside a mosque tucked away on the first floor of a residential building in Molenbeek, where dozens of young men filed in for Friday prayers last week.

SAVVY RECRUITERS

As a child, Salah visited the Attadamoun Mosque in Molenbeek but then stopped going, Habbachich said. He said some imams are too steeped in tradition to talk over the everyday challenges the youths face. Only one in two of the borough’s imams even speak French, he said.

“So they look elsewhere,” Vanderhaegen said, lured by recruiters who speak the “language of the street” such as sharia4belgium, a social media savvy organization whose leader and dozens of members were convicted early this year in the Flemish city of Antwerp of enticing dozens to fight in Syria.

Molenbeek Mayor Francoise Schepmans, who described her borough as a “breeding ground for radical violence”, admitted authorities have yet to come to grips with the problem.

Since 2014, four officers are on the watch for extremism among the 220,000 inhabitants of the police district Molenbeek is part of. “It’s not enough,” Schepmans said.

With at least 350 people from Belgium having gone to Syria to fight – the highest per capita number in Europe – and becoming heroes to others, many feel more needs to be done.

“Sharia4belgium walked our streets for years before the authorities intervened,” said Habbachich.

Although the number of new departures has more than halved from 10-12 per month in 2012-2013 to about 5 per month this summer, counter-terrorism expert Rik Coolsaet said, today’s new generation of would-be IS fighters are a less idealistic, more “hard-core” group of “sadism, adventure, thrill seekers”.

“In this no-future atmosphere, it is a new outlet for deviant behavior,” he said. “One which gives them some kind of belonging.”

In a correctional home for minors in Brussels, where Mohamed Azaitraoui works as a Muslim counselor, four out of 80 of his charges have been picked up by the security services on suspicion of having IS ties.

He recently spent months counseling a 17-year-old, whom he believes dealt directly online with a Syrian recruiter.

Azaitraoui’s professional experience has made him particularly watchful even of his own teenage children.

“Better not to wake up one day and find they’ve gone,” he said. “Teens think they are Rambos: invincible. They are told they’ll be offered salvation in Syria. It’s a delectable myth.”

(Editing by Anna Willard)